The path of the Pegasus pipeline in Arkansas

Exxon's pipeline cuts across the watersheds that provide drinking water for 770,000 Arkansans.

ON THE PIPELINE SHELF: Lowell Myers looks across to the Pegasus easement on the Little Red River.

The oil that erupted in Mayflower back in March began its trip in an Illinois hamlet named Patoka, 90 minutes east of St. Louis. It shot down ExxonMobil's 20-inch Pegasus pipeline, under farms and forests, over the Mississippi River via a state highway bridge, through the Missouri Ozarks, across the Arkansas state line and, a few miles later, near the workplace of one Glenda Jones, whom you can find on a summer Saturday at her bar job, watching the Cardinals thump the Cubs.

The other bartender here at the Rolling Hills Country Club in the town of Pocahontas is named Brenda, so anyone visiting the golf course in far Northeast Arkansas is bound to meet one of the Endas, as they're known around the club. At 5 p.m. it's quiet in the 10-table lounge but for a Fox broadcaster making Jones's day: "Molina deep ... back to the wall ... it's gone!" Jones, the proud Enda and part-time house cleaner who refers to the Cardinals as "we," hollers, "Yes, finally!"

Ask her about Pocahontas, and she's quick to tout its famous five rivers (the Spring, the Black, the Current, the Fourche, the Eleven Point). And the people are sure friendly. "Course they are," she says. "We're in the middle of the Bible Belt. Know what I mean? Everybody's nice here." If one thing gives her pause about this area, it might be the Pegasus. It runs right under her yard, and she worries about it rusting. "Stuff like that only lasts so long," she says.

The Pegasus spill surprised many people in Mayflower, in part because many of them had no idea they were living atop an oil superhighway. So we got to wondering: Where does the Pegasus go? To find out, we traced its path using maps publicly available from the federal agency that regulates pipelines, the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). We got precise with Google Earth, following the pipeline's easement — the broad, bald line where trees are kept off the pipe — through the 13 Arkansas counties the Pegasus crosses on its way to Texas. From satellite images, we could see what another break in the Exxon pipeline could directly threaten: pastures, national forest, rivers, creeks, homes, churches, at least one school, this golf course. It also crosses watersheds for 18 drinking water sources that, together, serve about 770,000 people, a quarter of the state's population. We asked the people in those areas how the pipeline affects their lives. The prospect of a spill makes most of them fretful, while one man thought a spill would punch his ticket to better places.

The 858-mile Pegasus, now well into its seventh decade, has lain unused since March 29, when it burst open in the otherwise pleasant Mayflower neighborhood of Northwoods and belched up 210,000 gallons of heavy crude, by Exxon's tally.

The old pipe spends most of its time underground and is, in any case, just a long, steel conduit, without much character. Ah, but the places it traverses in Arkansas — nearly 300 miles of them! — are full of characters. They've lived with the pipeline underfoot since the 1940s, so long that many have never given it a thought. Many Arkansans we visited — Glenda Jones among them — didn't realize until a reporter called that their local pipeline was the same one that cracked open in Mayflower. And because they're living on top of a pipeline that's now been shown to crack itself open with no apparent provocation, and which a forensic report after the spill cited for manufacturing defects, they get to wonder the obvious.

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